As part of the Farewell to Krush week, we went to dinner at Esperanto on a rainy Tuesday night. I had heard about this place but never been and with my impending trip to Brazil, I was excited to try it out. The menu has a lot of classic Brazilian dishes such as Feijoada, chayote salad, ceviche, and chuelta. We started off the night with some classic guacamole ($10) and fried yuca ($5). The guacamole was your basic solid variety but the yuca fries were amazing. Incredibly crispy and fried perfectly and served with a great aioli mayo. It was so good that we promptly ordered another round of it as well as an order of the red snapper ceviche ($10) and the roasted mussels ($9). I was torn on what to get for an entree (classic struggle of meat or fish) and opted for the moqueca ($18) which is a Brazilian stew with shrimp and snapper. I was excited to try the ceviche but it was a pretty disappointing dish. It was not very citrus-y and it had a ton of red and green peppers in it. I'm not sure if that's the Brazilian way to do it, but I thought it took away from the overall flavor of the dish and the fish itself wasn't that impressive. Total bummer.
Fortunately my main dish made up for the lacking ceviche. The moqueca was a stew with coconut milk, ginger, cashew with shrimp and red snapper and served with a side of white rice. It's essentially like a coconut curry and it was delicious. I could have used more and larger pieces shrimp and snapper but the sauce part was good enough on its own. I was loving taking spoonfuls of the rice covered in sauce on its own.
While the food and atmosphere was classic South American, so was the service. It was slow and confusing. They totally forgot our roasted mussel appetizer which ended up being fine because we were all pretty full but they also totally forgot Krush's tuna dish. We kept asking about it and it was obvious when all our food came out at the same time and hers came out 15 minutes later (it was just a medium rare tuna) that it was lost in the shuffle. I guess I need to get used to the more "laid back" service when I'm in Brazil but I'm still totally excited for it. Total bill: $62/pp with tax and tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
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